Separation Anxiety

Published in somewhat edited form June 20, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     I have just watched online a CNN  interview with John Moore, the Getty photographer who took the photograph that went viral over the weekend of a wailing two-year-old on the ground near the border.  She's a little Honduran girl in hot pink shirt and shoes, black pants; her mother had just put her down,  obeying the orders of a border patrol guard who was about to begin a body search.

           

     Moore said the mother, who’d just spent a month crossing Mexico, did not know what was coming.  She did not know what was going to happen to her, much less that her daughter, who she’d carried the whole trip, would be taken from her person.  She had no idea that her daughter would be taken to some unknown place where she would not be able to protect her child, much less know if she was safe.  But the photographer knew, and the separation anxiety he witnessed in the little girl set off separation anxiety in him and magnified it 100 times.

           

     Although the tears he captured on film were a normal two-year-old’s reaction to uncertainty, I think they represent what we all are feeling after learning what we’re doing at the border.  “The families there had no idea they were about to be separated from their children,” he said.  “I could tell they weren’t up on the recent news, they’ve been traveling in difficult conditions.  But I knew what was going to happen next.  And for me to take these pictures, scenes that I’d seen before but with the knowledge that these parents and their children would soon be in separate detention facilities – made it hard for me personally as a journalist, as a human being, and especially as a father.”  Then he added, just as the interview ended, “on Father’s Day.”

           

     That tail-end comment brought me close to understanding something my father always said about never losing your concern for your children.  John Moore, the photographer, is silver-haired; his children are likely out of the nest at least and safely on their own journey.  But for many people, the desire to protect and provide never leaves.  Those feelings of responsibility are extended when the events of childhood and child-raising leave scars on one or both sides of the equation.

     Many professionals, like Dr. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Association of Pediatrics, have expressed concern for the long-term impacts on the children from this separation from their parents.  But I have tremendous fear also for the parents, and not only what they’re feeling now, but will feel about themselves in the future.  Some of these families will get through this, roughed up but intact.  Some of them won’t.

           

     Do any of you remember the film “Sophie’s Choice?”  In it, the Nazis forced Meryl Streep’s character to decide which child to keep with her, her son or her daughter, with the unchosen child to be taken away by the tyrants.  The scene has never left my body; I can still see her standing in line, paralyzed, traumatized.  My mind has blocked out which child she chose, but not her only recourse for  having made the decision, which was suicide.  The “choice” forced upon her was deliberately inhuman.   I think what we're doing to these families is, too. 

           

     This administration’s action is not a question of enforcing the laws.  It’s trying to force the country’s already-divided politicians into a frenetic free-for-all, while Donald Trump stands aside, watching gleefully at the mayhem he’s created.  The immigrant families are merely hostages of yet another malevolent scheme to make DT look effective.  But now we’re hostages, too, those of us brought to tears by the stories of family separations.  I think what we’re grieving is the breaking of the parent-child bond.  Let us use our empathetic grief to change this policy.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who lives in Lindsay.  You can send your thoughts to her at P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Be sure to read "When ICE Comes" as well  from two weeks ago.

 

Vietnam

Published in edited form Sept. 27, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette
    
     Some of the news this weekend focused on the word “divisive,” referring to Donald Trump’s leadership style.   It ranged from high-profile TV sports to kitchen tables around the country.  On one hand we had the NFL’s rebuttal to Trump’s criticism of their leadership regarding kneeling during the national anthem, which split sports fans rooting for the same team into armed camps.  On another, we heard about the study session Oprah conducted in Michigan for 60 Minutes.  Participants were asked about the influences of Trump's leadership, and they answered with stories of dividedness across regions, classes and occupations, down to the family level.  Many expressed fears that this dividedness could lead to civil war.
    
     I had intended to explore the word “divisive” for this week’s edition until I watched the sixth episode of Ken Burns’ Vietnam series Sunday night.  Although I know our country is divided now, the series is reminding me of the deep divisions we experienced then - and lived through.  That is what I want to explore with you now.    

    
     The Vietnam series is chronicling the U.S. involvement in another country’s war.  I was a child when our involvement started and a teenager when it escalated to full-fledged commitment of troops and materiel. The sixth episode took us through Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in June 1968, the month of my high school graduation.  At that point, like so many people interviewed in the series, I believed the government’s version of the Vietnam story.  At that point I did not believe our government would lie to us.   

    
     Then I went away to college, to the quiet campus of Willamette University in Oregon’s capitol, Salem, where I’d received the best financial aid package.  Most of the students were from conservative, middle-class families who wanted their children safe, and campus activities reflected that desire.  But the outrage unfolding on other campuses around the country wafted through, and by the time I went home for my second (and last) summer, the sorrow of the Kent State student killings in Ohio had become outrage in me.  Not only had our government lied about the deaths and waste of Vietnam, they’d lied about the freedom of speech guaranteed by the Constitution.  Protesting could get you killed in the U.S. as easily as in the U.S.S.R.   

    
     My outrage extended to my family’s conservative, WWII values system, and drove me from them more completely than any fight over the 2016 election would have.  I did not notice (nor was I told) when my brother, the curly-headed second child, signed up in early 1971.  Late 1972, when he came home in a body bag we could not unzip, sorrow and outrage merged with guilt and pain to form a canyon I barely recognized.  As a family, we never really recovered.     


     But the country did, eventually, though I wouldn't say it healed.  What the Vietnam series is providing now is an understanding of the issues that both led us there and kept us from addressing the root causes at the time.  With that understanding - and a modicum of forgiveness and humility - I feel that healing might be occurring as we watch.    

    
     Our current president’s management style, learned from the competitive world of business, is divide and conquer.  It was defined by Machiavelli, and employed by despots like Julius Caesar and Napoleon.  According to Wikipedia, Immanuel Kant wrote that “divide and conquer” is the third of three political maxims, the others being “act now, make excuses later,” and “when you commit a crime, deny it.”  The power of divisiveness as a political strategy has been proven over and over, to the woe of peoples around the world.   

    
     But what the dividedness of the Vietnam era shows us is the necessity of respecting its source.  When an issue divides us, a real issue and not just a rude comment stemming from an inexcusable attitude, and we recognize the validity of complaints on all sides, then we have a prayer of coming together in true unity.    

    
     The issues that divide us now are real.  We need leaders who help us find ways to address them, not shame those who stand (or kneel) in protest of the status quo.

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Trudy Wischemann is a Gold-Star Sister who writes.  You can send her your protests c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

Just Fear

Published March 15, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “It’s just fear,” I said to my friend Pam on the phone the other day.  We were talking about relationships, the great subject of womankind, and I was mentioning a discovery I’d made for about the ten-thousandth time.

           

     “Trudy,” she said, having known me for more than 40 years, “do you think you could leave off the word ‘just’?”

           

     My mental eyes opened as she stripped away my protective covering.  Minimizing fear is one of the ways we try to deal with the most natural, protective instinct we were born with.  By treating my fear as if it is a gnat-sized annoyance, I’m making myself a gladiator, big enough to spit in its face and walk away.  Dealing with what caused the fear is a different, and actually more productive, response.

           

     I think fear is at the root of the deep divide that is said to be plaguing the country.  If I were to give that fear a name, it is that people are afraid of being left behind economically because of the group they belong to, shut out from participating in America’s bounty because of some categorization scheme.  For many this fear is not “just,” but justified.  Many people have to overcome not just fear, but also handicaps placed on them by others in order to receive rewards for their efforts.

           

     And it seems to me that the people placing those handicaps on others are being driven by fear.  Is it also justified?  Might be worth asking that question.

           

     Fear makes jihadists out of rebels, revolutionaries out of social discontents.  It makes nations go to war.  It makes men (and women) buy guns to protect their households and their persons even though the statistics on gun accidents show that people harm themselves more often than trespassers.  It makes people stop loving each other even when the reasons for loving still exist.

           

     “Fear not,” were the first words I really comprehended in the Bible when I returned to the church in search of faith.  The Quaker mystic Rufus M. Jones understood fear’s universal role in conflict, as well as the antidote to fear that Christianity offers.  He wrote this passage sometime during the prelude to World War II:

           

     “Christ’s major point throughout the Sermon on the Mount is to get rid of fears and anxieties.  It might almost be said that the substance of his mission as a teacher was to set us free from the slavery of fears.  ‘Why are ye so fearful?’ he keeps saying.  Stop your unnecessary worries.  Cut out your excessive anxieties.  It has been well said that the most ruinously expensive of all our emotions is fear.  It is that very emotion of fear that has thrown our world out of joint and brought us to this unspeakable calamity. . . .”

           

     Many of the fears being expressed by people on my side of the political divide are that the fears being generated and/or fanned to flames on the other side will push us toward more ‘unspeakable calamities’ like those we’ve witnessed before:  genocides like the Jews’ and Armenians’, wars like Viet Nam, El Salvador and Afghanistan.  Extinctions like the passenger pigeon, soon to be replicated in the Arctic, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the Pacific Flyway.  In this new realm of “alternative facts,” there are fears for justice itself moving to the endangered species list.

           

     Pam’s right.  It’s time to leave off the word “just” and learn to deal with our fear another way than minimizing it.  It’s time to face the music, so to speak:  the music of democracy is equality among, not advantage over, others.  Let’s dance.

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Trudy Wischemann is a neophyte Friend who writes.  You can send her your stories of defeating fear c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Thanks to Carolyn Davenport for her loving and helpful feedback.